5/16/2019 The 1945 'Liberation Concert' Played by an Orchestra of Holocaust Survivors - Atlas Obscura

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The 1945 ‘Liberation Concert’

Played by an Orchestra of
Holocaust Survivors
The performance took place at St. Ottilien Archabbey, a
Benedictine monastery that became a hospital for
Jewish displaced persons.
BY E M A N U E L L A G R I N B E RG D E C E M B E R 0 7, 2 0 1 8

O
n May 27, 1945, U.S. Army Private Robert Hilliard set off from
his base near Munich into the Bavarian countryside. Nearly
one month had passed since Allied Forces liberated Nazi
Germany and the 19-year-old soldier was heading to a concert organized
by and for Holocaust survivors. Billed as a “liberation concert,” such an
event so soon after the war’s end seemed almost frivolous to him. But
he thought it would make a fine feature story for the Army newspaper
he edited. And, he would quickly learn it was anything but frivolous.

Hilliard’s destination was St. Ottilien Archabbey, a Benedictine

monastery that was home to a new hospital for Jewish Holocaust
survivors. The German military had ousted the monks during the war
and turned St. Ottilien into a hospital for German troops. When the
U.S. Army took over supervision of the monastery in early May 1945, it
became a camp for displaced persons, or DPs, as the survivors were
known to those overseeing their resettlement.

The walled monastic complex rose from rolling green farmland. Hilliard
drove through a stone-walled entrance and parked on the edge of a wide
green lawn. A stage of mismatched wooden boards was covered in a
patchwork quilt of bedsheets and parachute cloth. The survivors in the
audience resembled stick figures—emaciated, pale, expressionless.
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Some were so weak they had to be carried from their hospital beds. Off
to the side, Hilliard observed a mix of civilians and soldiers—most
likely, Germans and Americans—casually talking and smoking
cigarettes.

The juxtaposition of captors, captives, and liberators was jarring to

Hilliard. In the camps, Jewish musicians played for Nazi soldiers in
mess halls and on train platforms as fellow prisoners of war arrived.
Now, still dressed in their striped uniforms, the musicians played
anthems of the Allied Nations and Jewish folks songs for an estimated
audience of 400 people.

Hilliard described it as, “a concert of life and a concert of death,” one in

which “most of the liberated people were too weak to stand; a liberation
concert in which most of the people could not believe that they were
free.” Eventually, the group of musicians would come to be known by
various names, including the St. Ottilien Orchestra, the Ex-
Concentration Camp Orchestra, and the Representative Orchestra of
the She’erit Hapletah, a Hebrew phrase translating to “surviving
remnant.”

Hilliard’s recollections from his memoir, Surviving the Americans, turned

over in my mind when I visited St. Ottilien in September 2018 for a
concert commemorating the 1945 event. Today, as in 1945, the concert
was intended to convey sentiments of remembrance and reconciliation
in turbulent times, organizers said. The musicians were from Tel Aviv
University’s Buchmann-Mehta School of Music, Israel’s leading classical
music academy, and many were descendants of Holocaust survivors.
Accompanied by the world-renowned German violinist Anne-Sophie
Mutter, they played for an audience of Germans, Americans, and
Israelis, some with a direct connection to St. Ottilien.

It was my second visit to St. Ottilien in three months after learning

about it in 2017. My grandparents and the uncle for whom I am named
reunited there after the Holocaust, and my grandfather was the first
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chief doctor of the DP hospital. But I didn’t know any of this family
trivia until the fall of last year, when I decided to start searching for the
grandparents I never knew. In my first visit to the monastery, I felt an
instant connection to the place that offered my family refuge after a
harrowing period in their lives. I could imagine them walking the same
cobblestone paths, minding the ever-present church bells—or possibly
cursing them just as I did in the early morning.

At the 2018 concert, I came to understand the 1945 liberation concert as

an expression of a particular kind of beauty that comes from
overcoming immense pain and sorrow. My heart ached for my
grandparents and other survivors as I tried to comprehend their state of
mind in this transitional period. Although they were no longer prisoners
of war, they nevertheless faced an uncertain future. Anti-semitism in
Europe did not end with the defeat of the Third Reich, and some Allies
maintained the strict immigration quotas that prevented Europe’s Jews
from fleeing Nazi persecution. As such, historians see parallels between
the plight of the Jewish DPs and today’s global refugee crisis.

For these survivors, it was a period of renewal, but also an era of

continued struggle and conflicting visions for the future. In a speech at
the 1945 concert, my grandfather described the surviving remnant’s
tenuous state.

“We are free now, but we do not know how, or with what to begin our
free yet unfortunate lives,” he said in German, a language he picked up
from his captors. “It seems to us that for the present mankind does not
understand what we have gone through and experienced during this
period. And it seems to us that we shall neither be understood in the
future.”

My visits to St. Ottilien to confront the past coincided with the

monastery’s own historic reckoning for the first time since the DP camp
closed 70 years ago. Throughout 2018, St. Ottilien partnered with
Bavarian heritage groups and cultural institutions on memorial events,
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including an academic symposium and two memorial concerts. With

the rise of anti-Semitism and extremist ideologies in the United States
and Europe, organizers of the events said it’s more important than ever
to remind people of the effects of hatred, especially as the collective
memory of the Holocaust fades with the last generation of survivors.
The responsibility of preserving those memories from St. Ottilien is
passing on to the next generation, many of whom were born at the
monastery. A handful attended the 2018 memorial concert, eager as I
was to connect with their history.

St. Ottilien today is a different place from when Hilliard first

encountered it. Recent additions include a beer garden and a gift shop.
But to newcomers, walking along its shaded paths past religious shrines
and monks in black robes can feel like stepping back in time, even if the
idols have fresh coats of paint and the monks are carrying smartphones.

The grassy site of the liberation concert has been carved into a thin
sliver to accommodate new paths. But the two-story building next to it
that was a hospital for Jewish patients, with a kosher kitchen in the
basement, still stands. Today, it’s a middle school with a sign in front
explaining its history—one of several on the grounds marking points of
significance from the DP camp era.

From 1945 to 1948, some 5,000 survivors passed through St. Ottilien
and more than 400 children were born there as families reunited and
new ones began. My grandfather was among the first group to arrive. In
late April, with the help of an American soldier, he and fellow survivors
obtained permission to turn several buildings in the Benedictine
monastery into a temporary hospital.

The monastery was one of many DP camps in Allied-occupied Germany,

Austria, and Italy. They were conceived as temporary centers while the
Allies and aid groups worked to repatriate Jews to the countries where

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they lived before the war. But many refugees refused or felt unable to
return to the places where they had lost everything. And so the camps
evolved as Jews began to rebuild their lives within their confines.

Few of the DP camps were like St. Ottilien, however. Most were housed
in former military installations, labor camps, and even repurposed
concentration camps. Situated in the lush Bavarian countryside, with
modern amenities including a hospital, a gymnasium, and a printing
press, St. Ottilien offered a comparatively comfortable setting.

Many survivors arrived with overlapping conditions, such as

tuberculosis, starvation, and infectious skin diseases, and some would
succumb would to them. Less than a week after their arrival, the first
burial was held in a cemetery created for the Jewish survivors on the
monastery’s periphery. Despite these cruel twists of fate, the conferral
of a proper Jewish burial, presided over by a rabbi, offered an early sign
of the restoration of dignity and community to the surviving remnant.
An elementary school and a maternity ward came next.

As word spread of the material comforts St. Ottilien offered, the

renowned Lithuanian violinist Michael Hofmekler was one of many
refugees to seek it out. Also known as Misha, Moishe, and Michel, he
was born in Vilna in 1905 to a family deeply involved in music. His
career took off in the 1920s and 1930s in Kovno, earning the recognition
of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas in 1932. After the German
occupation of Lithuania in the summer of 1941, Hofmekler was forced
into the Kovno ghetto with his parents and sister. Only he would live to
see the war’s end.

After surviving several massacres that wiped out most of Kovno’s Jews
within six months of the German occupation, Hofmekler obtained
permission from the ghetto’s Jewish council to start an orchestra. When
the Nazis evacuated the ghetto in 1944, he and others were sent to a
forced labor camps across Bavaria, where they built bunkers and

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supplies for Hitler’s army. After liberation, he made his way to St.
Ottilien and helped form the orchestra that performed at the liberation
concert.

Unexpectedly, Hofmekler also reunited with family at St. Ottilien. His

brother Robert had left Europe for the United States in 1938. He was
drafted into the U.S. Army and in June 1945, Robert Hofmekler found
his brother at St. Ottilien. And 73 years later, a Hofmekler descendant
would find his long-lost relative there, too.

D
aniel Hofmekler was another brother who left Lithuania before
the war. He carried on the family’s musical legacy as a music
teacher in Palestine’s growing Jewish community and later, a
cellist in the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. His son, Eyal Hofmekler,
was born in Israel and he, too, inherited the family passion for music.
Today, he restores musical instruments and accessories. When concert
organizers asked him to build an instrument for the program, he was
honored, even though he knew little about St. Ottilien’s significance at
the time.

Eyal says this year’s concert is a “continuation of the family music

tradition,” a legacy that lives on through the student musicians from Tel
Aviv University who performed at the concert.

One of those students, the violinist Vicky Gelman, has no connection to

St. Ottilien, like most of the musicians. But as an Israeli and a Jew, the
memory of the Holocaust looms large in her life. She’s heard the stories
from her grandparents and she participates in memorial events each
year on Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is a national holiday in
Israel. Being in St. Ottilien for the concert brought a new dimension to
her experience of the Holocaust.

“We come to the place where everything happened and it’s real, we feel
it, we stand on the land,” she says. “It’s not just a regular stage at school
or a concert hall.”
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T
he 2018 memorial concert took place inside the monastery’s
Gothic church instead of on the grassy plot. On the afternoon of
concert, sun streamed through the church’s stained glass
windows, brightening its vaulted stone interiors. Purple stage lights
transformed the altar into a dramatic backdrop for the makeshift
orchestra near the pulpit crammed with music stands and chairs.

German classical music fans filed into the pews, taking seats alongside
descendants of survivors. Eli Ipp was an infant when his parents
brought him to St. Ottilien. His father was a doctor in the monastery’s
hospital. As the young musicians dressed in black took their seats to
thundering applause, “my heart burst with pride and tears flowed, to
feel and see how history had reversed itself,” says Ipp.

The program began with the same bellow of horns that opened the 1945
concert in Edvard Grieg’s “Triumphal March.” It was the only song
from the original program. The orchestra manager Bilha Rubenstein
says she and others worked hard to find pieces that brought a modern
feel to the hopeful, yet elegiac tone of the 1945 program. Instead of
performing popular Jewish folk songs, the orchestra performed
arrangements of poems by Aharan Harlap and Yaakov Barzilai, two
Holocaust survivors. Singing in Hebrew, the soloist Hila Baggio brought
some in the audience to tears as she conveyed the poets’ haunting
depictions of the camps.

For many in the church, the real draw was the legendary violinist Anne-
Sophie Mutter. She proposed playing Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 in
A-Major as an expression of “beauty that nearly hurts,” Doris Popischil,
the concert organizer, says. At Mutter’s request, the program was not
broadcast, in order to preserve its intimacy. Just as in 1945, this year’s
concert represented a collective pledge for a better future—“a promise
that this will, under our watch, never happen again,” Mutter said after
the concert.

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For the encore, monks joined the orchestra onstage. Their voices united
with Baggio’s in Avinu malkeinu, the Hebrew prayer of repentance that
Jews in the audience had likely heard days earlier during Yom Kippur.

Church bells sounded as the song drew to a close. The audience sat in
silence, contemplating how horrendous acts of inhumanity had created
such beauty. Again, I thought of my grandfather’s 1945 speech.

“We unlearned to laugh; we cannot cry anymore; we do not understand

our freedom: probably because we are still among our dead comrades!
Let us rise and stand in silence to commemorate our dead!”

REFUGEES J U DA I S M M U S I C H I STO RY WO R L D WA R I I

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